On the traditional Armistice Day, 94 years after the “War to End Wars”
ended, three vociferous peace activists tackled the question of “U.S.
wars — are they lawful?” and all found America’s current conflicts
bypassing the Constitution or international law.

xxxxxxThey were Cindy Sheehan, gold-star mother best known for her 2005 Iraq-War protest at the Bush Texas ranch; David Swanson, writer, blogger, and radio
host in Washington, DC; and Medea Benjamin, co-founder of Code Pink and
Global Exchange. Theyspoke (in that order)at an 11/11 forum that highlighted
the 2012 biennial general meeting of the War and Law League (WALL) in San
Francisco’s main public library.

xxxxxxMajor points by each speaker follow below. Then come excerpts from a panel
discussion that followed the talks, other details of the meeting, and further
biographies.

CINDY SHEEHAN: Don’t whitewash Democratic war crime.

President Obama’s regime — marked by executions through drones
and an attack on Libya without the OK of Congress — was termed
“totalitarianism” by Cindy Sheehan.

xxxxxx“Democratic wars are just as bad, if not worse than Republican wars,” she
said, “because at least when there’s a Republican war, there’s more opposition to
it.”

xxxxxxShe began with a question. Does anyone have an accurate count of the
number of wars that the U.S. is waging? Afghanistan topped her list. “We’re still
not out of Iraq,” witness tens of thousands of mercenary soldiers, an immense
embassy with thousands of employees, big consulates, and continuing violence.
With the aid of the audience, she went on to list Libya, Yemen, Pakistan, Syria,
Philippines, Somalia, and Latin America. “We have about 800 bases around the
world too, and, trust me, where we have our bases, the people aren’t happy about
it.”

xxxxxxAre those wars legal? “Of course not” was Ms. Sheehan’s answer. The
Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war; the president’s power to
conduct it as the military commander-in-chief begins after Congress declares war,
she said. The authorization given to George W. Bush on 9/14/01 for military force
against those responsible for 9/11 has been used by Bush and Obama “to justify
torture, drones, robotic warfare, and a whole host of war crimes and crimes against
humanity….”

xxxxxxAs soon as the UN adopted a resolution approving a no-fly zone in Libya, “I
sent out something … to my list and I said, ‘Do you know what a no-fly zone
means? … Within days, there’s going to be active bombing.’ And I was right. Tens
of thousands of innocent Libyans were killed in the U.S.-NATO bombing of
Libya.” The North Atlantic Treaty Organization “has now become just another
military extension of the United States empire, and the UN has now become a
rubber stamp for empire,” because both get most of their funding from the U.S.

xxxxxxMs. Sheehan asked rhetorically, who or what body is going to stop the U.S.
empire’s war machine from doing whatever it wants to do? “The people in the
streets. Soldiers refusing orders. People all over the world in solidarity…. It’s up to
us to be in solidarity with the innocent people that the U.S. bombs on a daily basis,
oppresses, occupies. We need to be in the streets and demand that it stop and we
don’t stop doing that just because a Democrat’s in office.” That drew applause.

xxxxxxBut demonstrations against such troubles as the intervention in Libya and
the prospect of invading Iran have not been big, she said. “I was at a protest at
Fresno yesterday. There were 40 people … and before the bombing of Iraq, they
had 1,500. Do you think if it was George Bush or Dick Cheney or McCain doing
those things that we would be silent?…

xxxxxx“I just found out today that a 17-year-old girl is on Obama’s kill list, that he
has already executed in Yemen three American citizens without their due process.
One was a 16-year-old boy. He [Obama] has ‘terror Tuesdays.’… If your own
president is executing you, there’s something wrong with that picture…. When the
president can sign execution orders, when the president can kill tens of thousands
of innocent Libyans without even bothering to run it by Congress, then you’re
looking at totalitarianism….

xxxxxx“It was four years ago almost when Obama was inaugurated, and the third day
in office, Obama authorized his first drone strike, in Pakistan, killing 36 people.”
She thereupon wrote those on a big e-mail list of hers (compiled during her 2008
run for San Francisco’s congressional seat), “It didn’t take him very long to be a
war criminal.” About 40,000 people quit her list that day, she recalled. “You know
what they said? ‘Give him a chance.’… Now he’s had a chance for four years.
Now it’s our turn to have our voices heard, and I hope that we renew with
increased vigor our opposition to the U.S. empire and what it does.”

DAVID SWANSON: All wars are criminal.

“We banned all war in 1928,” David Swanson said. The ban was imposed by the Kellogg-Briand Pact. So any military action, even if declared by Congress, is a war crime, in his view.

xxxxxxToday 81 nations, including the U.S., are parties to that treaty, “and many of them comply with it. I would like to see additional nations, poorer nations that were left out of the treaty, join it … and then urge the greatest purveyor of violence in the world to comply as well.

xxxxxx“It’s easier to comply with the UN Charter because of the two big loopholes it opened up, allowing wars that are either defensive or simply UN-approved. As you know, the United States fights wars against unarmed, impoverished nations halfway around the planet and calls them defensive … [and] fights wars never approved by the UN and claims that they were.”

xxxxxxAlthough Kellogg-Briand and the dream of abolishing war is nearly forgotten, the UN Charter made it unlawful to threaten war, something the U.S. is constantly doing, Mr. Swanson said. An International Criminal Court has existed for a decade, however, he explained, it prosecutes only specific atrocities, applies only to nations that have chosen to submit to its authority, and prosecutes only cases approved by the permanent members of the UN Security Council.

xxxxxxThe Constitution requires that a declaration of war precede any conflict. The last one came in 1941. “Congress is to decide on lesser military actions that might not count as war. Congress is to raise armies as needed, but not to fund them for more than two years — a fact worth considering as we credit and applaud President Obama with supposedly ending a war in Afghanistan [begun in 2001] over the next two … years.”

xxxxxxThe War Powers Resolution of 1973, Mr. Swanson said, “legislated
exceptions to the Constitution, allowing presidents to launch wars or other military
actions for short periods of time prior to gaining congressional authorization.”

xxxxxxThe legislation preceding the Afghan and Iraq wars went even further, “handing
presidents the power to declare wars…. [The War and Law League disputes that
exceptions to the Constitution can be lawfully legislated — editor.]

xxxxxx“So-called special forces, the CIA, and our brave drones are engaged in
military action in dozens of nations, none defensively or UN-authorized, none in a
manner that escapes the Kellogg-Briand Pact, none with a constitutional
declaration, many without any sort of authorization from Congress, most without
knowledge of Congress.

xxxxxx“Civil cases brought against U.S. military actions are shut down by claims
of secret powers, or authorized by secret laws that we are not permitted to read,
including secret sections of the Patriot Act….” Although Obama announced that he
would review all of Bush’s memos from the Office of Legal Council, he has never
announced the results or said which secret measures were kept and which
discarded. According to The New York Times, there is a secret memo from the
Office of Legal Council that concludes, rather as John Yoo and Jay Bybee
concluded, that torture is not torture, that in fact murder is not murder. But even
Congress is not allowed to see the memo, so the Congressional Research Service
was reduced to guessing what could be in it….

xxxxxx“The incoherence of the various public comments from the White House
obscures that fact that the victims [of drones] are not all suspected of plotting
attacks on the United States. Most of the victims are simply innocent people in the
wrong place. Others are targeted without so much as knowing their names, based
on behavior…. [suggesting] that they are aligned with those defending a foreign
nation against U.S. attack…. At one congressional hearing not long ago, the
director of national intelligence was asked what foreign nation might attack the
United States, and he was unable to name one….

xxxxxx“With no cover of law. Obama is arming Syrian terrorists, training Iranian
terrorists, engaging in cyber attacks, and imposing what he calls so proudly
crippling sanctions, all arguably illegal acts of war. The UK attorney general has
decided that attacking Iran would be illegal. Top Israeli officials … have refused
orders to prepare an attack on Iran, in part because of the illegality.” Yet, Mr.
Swanson charged, the United States continues to threaten and lie about Iran and
propagandize and prepare for war.

MEDEA BENJAMIN: Drone warfare is lawless.

In its continual killings in Pakistan and Yemen by remote control,
the Obama Administration follows no valid law of Congress and
breaches international law, Medea Benjamin charged.

xxxxxxThe Administration claims that the authorization for the use of military force that
Congress approved three days after Sept. 11, 2001, provides a legal basis for its
drone wars. But, as Ms. Benjamin pointed out, that statute specifically limited the
recipients of military force to those whom the president found to be involved or
associated with the 9/11 terrorism.

xxxxxx“Well, the people that we are targeting today, many of them would have
been 10- or 11-years-old at the time of the 9/11 attacks. And there are
organizations that we are targeting today, like Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula
and Yemen, that didn’t even exist at the time of 9/11….”

xxxxxxThree out of four Pakistanis call America their enemy, said Ms. Benjamin.
She had recently returned from a trip to Pakistan with some 30 other Americans to
express opposition to attacks by the pilotless aircraft. The Pakistanis told of “living
in a state of terror…. how their children are afraid to go to sleep at night, how they
have lost their loved ones, how they fear going out into public places because
drones have attacked schools … market places … meetings of the respected elders,
like on March 17, 2011, when they came together to deal with a community
dispute…. For the remote-control pilot thousands of miles away, it looked like a
bunch of Taliban up to no good, and they sent in the drones and killed 42
people….

xxxxxx“They feel that the United States has absolutely no respect for the Pakistani
people, not only because we are killing people in Pakistan without even an
acknowledgment of it — much less any kind of apology or compensation — but
because the United States feels that it can violate the sovereignty of Pakistan….
They voted on it three times in the National Assembly, including unanimously,
demanding that the U.S. stop, and the U.S. has refused to do that.”

xxxxxxUnder international law, “you are not allowed to just kill people without
giving them a chance to surrender. Do you think drones give anyone a chance to
surrender?

xxxxxx“There’s also something called proportionality in international law that says
you have to weigh how many people might be killed and particularly how many
innocent people might be killed in the attacks you’re doing. The United States in
trying to get one ‘high value’ target has killed hundreds of innocent people. Of the
thousands of people that have been killed by the drone attacks, the U.S. can only
name 49 people that were on the ‘high value’ list, so who are all these other
people? They are either innocent people or low-level Taliban, many of whom are
just trying to get the United States out of their country.”

xxxxxxMs. Benjamin enumerated two kinds of drone attacks: One is called “the
personality strike, where they go after an individual.” It amounts to targeted
assassinations, a practice condemned by Presidents Ford and Reagan. The other is
a “signature strike… You are allowed to kill people on the basis of suspicious
behavior. Imagine people who are piloting drones from here in the United States
who have never been to the country they’re targeting, don’t speak the language,
don’t know the people, don’t know the culture, and they have been given the
authority to kill people on the basis of suspicious behavior.”

xxxxxxThe Administration claims that a drone campaign is not a war because no
U.S. lives are at risk, so Congress has no say. Drone attacks, started by the George
W. Bush Administration and “used once every 40 days, became under Obama …
once every four days and is becoming codified for a permanent war no matter who
is in the White House.”

xxxxxxSeveral Americans have been killed by drones, intentionally or
accidentally. “These great precision weapons couldn’t tell from 40,000 feet up in
the air if they were killing Taliban or they were killing U.S. soldiers and killed two
U.S. soldiers by mistake.”

xxxxxxMs. Benjamin branded the Central Intelligence Agency as illegal, for it is
supposed to be an intelligence agency, not a military institution, yet it carries out a
secret war though refusing to acknowledge it. “We know that the CIA is on a
killing spree.” In an earlier era when the CIA was out of control, the Church
investigation cast light on its crimes, like assassinations of heads of state. “Where
is Dianne Feinstein [as chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence]?
Why isn’t she holding these investigations in the Senate … demanding answers …
demanding from the Obama Administration the legal memos that have been
written justifying these drone wars?”

PANELISTS: Protests and police.

xxxxxxFollowing their talks, the three speakers gathered around a table on the stage of the San
Francisco Public Library’s Koret Auditorium, answering questions written on cards, mostly by
audience members. Among a variety of questions and replies were the following.

xxxxxxHow can the munitions factories be closed down? San Diego, a center of
weapons manufacturing, has a thriving peace community, which conducts weekly
demonstrations in front of General Atomics’ drone plant, Medea Benjamin said.
She added that a national call for a week of demonstrations at that plant and
comparable ones in southern California was coming soon and urged widespread
participation.

xxxxxxAre police cracking down on antiwar demonstrators? As a “grandmother of four, I never thought I was going to be tear-gassed,” Cindy Sheehan said. It has happened at war protests. When in custody, she asks the police, Why aren’t you arresting George Bush or Barack Obama instead of us? And, If you were ordered to shoot me, would you? The answer to the latter is always yes. She not only demonstrates but also resists federal taxes. “I haven’t paid my income tax since they killed my son.”

xxxxxxHow can the U.S. be brought into alignment with the world community?

Contending that plutocrats drive the war machine, David Swanson urged the
building of a broad coalition against the military-industrial complex, which, in his
opinion, has corrupted American society. He suggested enlisting, e.g., groups
concerned with civil liberties, which war infringes; and the environment, of which
war is the worst destroyer.

ALSO at the meeting

xxxxxxEarly in the three-hour conference, Paul W. Lovinger, founder and secretary of the War
and Law League, related highlights in the league’s history — 15 years (less four months) of
trying to “stop presidents from dictating war” contrary to the Constitution. Then WALL
reelected three officers, Jeannette Hassberg, coordinator; Dolores Rodriguez, treasurer; and
Lovinger, secretary; and three Executive Board members at large, Harry A. Scott, Grace Teresi,
and Ken Wachter. Three new board members were elected: Lotus Yee Fong, Francis R. Grinnon,
Jr., and Daniel Zwickel ben Avrám (who is also WALL’s webmaster and technical adviser).
Following the forum, an admission-free event, all three main speakers sold and signed books
they had written.

BIOGS of 3 speakers

xxxxxxCINDY SHEEHAN, of Vacaville, CA, is an antiwar activist who lost her soldier son in the
Iraq war. Her protest against the war at a makeshift camp near Bush’s Texas ranch attracted
international attention in August 2005. The next month she led an antiwar bus tour from Texas to
Washington, sponsored by peace groups. The media labeled her “Peace Mom” — the title of her
2006 memoir and a play about her performed in London. Her protests against Bush and Obama
got her arrested several times. She ran for Congress from San Francisco in 2008 and for vice-president in 2012. Since 2009 she has hosted a weekly broadcast, “Cindy Sheehan’s Soapbox.”

xxxxxxDAVID SWANSON is an antiwar activist, writer, blogger, and talk-show host, based in
Charlottesville, Virginia. He blogs at WarIsaCrime.org and DavidSwanson.org, works as
campaign coordinator for the online activist organization RootsAction.org, and hosts Talk
Nation Radio. His books include When the World Outlawed War, War Is A Lie,Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union, The Military
Industrial Complex at 50, and, a recent work for children,Tube World.

xxxxxxMEDEA BENJAMIN co-founded both CodePink, the antiwar women’s group; and Global
Exchange, the international human rights organization, both in San Francisco. An economist and
nutritionist turned activist, she has combated overseas sweatshops and taken delegations to Gaza.
In 2010 she received the Martin Luther King, Jr., Peace Prize from the Fellowship of
Reconciliation. In 2012, she was gassed and arrested for supporting democracy in Bahrain; was
physically ejected from an official pro-drone meeting she interrupted in Washington, D.C. (her
home base); and led a Code Pink delegation in Pakistan to protest drone attacks. She wrote
eight books, the latest being Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control.